Overview
Characters from different backgrounds are thrown together when the plane they're travelling on crashes into the Pacific Ocean. A nightmare fight for survival ensues with the air supply running out and dangers creeping in from all sides.
Another month, another shark film! This time the plot seems to have taken the basic premise of Airport 77, then thrust tiger sharks into the mix for added peril.
Sophie McIntosh plays Ava, the daughter of a prominent politician, who is heading off for a vacation with her friends, and her assigned bodyguard Brandon (Colm Meaney). The flight they take is quiet – explained away as it being an early flight, so less busy (but let’s be honest, it meant less people to spend the budget on) – and one of Ava’s friends worries that it is old and flimsy. He is kind of proven right when a birdstrike results in serious damage to one of the engines, and swiftly escalates in a chunk of fuselage ripping away, and the plane going down over water. Sinking swiftly, the angle at which the plane ends up resting forms an air pocket where the handful of survivors await rescue – only to find that the patch of water they crashed into is populated with rather hungry sharks, who thanks to the hole in the plane have access to the interior. All the while the plane starts to creak under the pressure, and slips more and more towards the abyss.
This is absolute nonsense, mashing a disaster movie format with a generic shark attack idea, and to be fair there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. However, as the film appears to be taking itself a tad too serious, not allowing much in the way of light relief among the melodrama and peril, it all ends up feeling as po-faced as one of those re-enactments you see on air-disaster investigation shows. In the first act it does seem as though the film knows what it is and will play to it, with Colm Meaney’s almost overly serious bodyguard being played just the right side of cliche to be fun, but once the plane crashes, the whole tone shifts and seems to forget the base personalities each of the parties demonstrated in the first act as the group simply become food for the sharks one by one.
There are some plus points, however, and the plane disaster itself is a spectacle, handling the chaotic frenzy as the plane starts to shred in mid flight with all the usual ruckus. Some of the shark kills are effective (even if the concept is preposterous), and, of course, the aforementioned Colm Meaney is always a pleasant addition to a film. But it just feels all very samey to things seen before, and the shrunk down cast when compared to other air-flight disaster films means less personality clashes to create additional tension in the situation.
It wasn’t a bad film, but nor was it a good film, this sits plainly in the middle somewhere as something that is just disposable fodder to pass some time, but won’t leave much impression afterwards.